


Le Carnaval des Animaux

by ConstanceComment



Category: Les Misérables (2012), Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe - Canon, Alternate Universe - Shapeshifters, Angst, Canonical Character Death, Child Abandonment, Community: makinghugospin, F/F, F/M, Familial Abuse, Family, Harm to Children, Implied Character Death, Implied Child Abuse, Implied Sexual Content, Kink Meme, Literary References & Allusions, M/M, Multi, Mythological References & Allusions, Non-Linear Narrative, POV Alternating, Repressed Memories, Revolution, Romance, Stream of Consciousness, Suicide, Unrequited Love, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-24
Updated: 2013-01-24
Packaged: 2017-11-26 17:23:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,601
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/652650
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ConstanceComment/pseuds/ConstanceComment
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“It is our belief that if the soul were visible to the eye every member of the human species would be seen to correspond to some species of the animal world and a truth scarcely perceived by thinkers would be readily confirmed, namely, that from the oyster to the eagle, from the swine to the tiger, all animals are to be found in men and each of the exists in some man, sometimes several at a time."</p><p>Victor Hugo, <i>Les Misérables</i>, Book Five — <i>Degradation</i>, Part V — <i>Flickers on the Horizon</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Le Carnaval des Animaux

**Author's Note:**

> Based on this prompt at the kinkmeme:  
> "Okay, kinkmeme. I've just seen the movie adaptation of LesMiz, and I know how kinkmemes usually have at least one prompt where someone gives everyone daemons. I would like to see a twist on this: Instead of having daemons, everyone can shapeshift at will into their animal.
> 
> Gavroche, quick and sharp, is a stoat with bright eyes.  
> The Thenardiers, loving, thieving, and ever attracted to shiny objects, are jackdaws.  
> Jean Valjean, powerfully built, solitary, and noble, is a tiger, still strong despite his age.  
> And Inspector Javert is a wolf, a dark black wolf with clear blue eyes, and he will run Jean off his feet.
> 
> Any pairing, any situation, and you can add in as many other characters as you like, so long as you include a scene of Javert shifting into and out of wolf form to chase/catch Valjean. Valjean does not have to be present, but if you do make it a pairing moment, please attempt to go light on the pairing itself. To me, the hottest thing is not the idea of sex but of the chase with those two."
> 
> I've tried to do my best by the prompt, though I must admit the length got away from me a bit. As I've never read the brick and the author mentioned this being inspired by the movie, I've stuck to what I know and mostly based everything here from the recent movie. However, some details and changes did come from the brick, and I apologize in advance if I've screwed anything up too terribly. As for canon- the characters turn into animals. Otherwise, everything is the same.
> 
> And I may not need to make this clear, but that does mean that this has all the trigger warnings associated with Les Mis. Which is to say; people die. A lot. In fact, two people even commit suicide, so be aware, okay? There are also moments of implied child abuse, and of child abandonment. Please let me know if I've failed to warn correctly for any triggers.
> 
> Uncountable thanks to my enabler and friend, [rainbowodessey](http://rainbowodyssey.tumblr.com) who put up with this insanity and introduced me to this fandom. Further thanks to [shiftyobserver](http://shiftyobserver.tumblr.com), who helped pick out grammatical errors.
> 
> All due apologies to Victor Hugo, who while he cared very much about copyright laws, did seem to think that the work belongs to and returns always to the people after the death of the author. It's been a few hundred years. I figure it's fair game.

“It is our belief that if the soul were visible to the eye every member of the human species would be seen to correspond to some species of the animal world and a truth scarcely perceived by thinkers would be readily confirmed, namely, that from the oyster to the eagle, from the swine to the tiger, all animals are to be found in men and each of the exists in some man, sometimes several at a time.

“Animals are nothing but the portrayal of our virtues and vices made manifest to the eyes, the visible reflections of our souls. God displays them to us to give us food for thought. But since they are no more than shadows, He has not made then educable in the sense of the word – Why should He do so? Our souls on the other hand, being realities with a purpose proper to themselves have been endowed with intelligence, that is to say, the power to learn.”

“… Granted the supposition that in every man there is contained a species of the animal kingdom, we may at once place Inspector Javert. The Austrian peasants believe that in every wolf-litter there is a dog-whelp which the mother kills, because otherwise when it grows larger it will devour the rest of her young. Endow this dog with a human face, and you have Javert.”

— Victor Hugo, _Les Misérables_ , Book Five – _Degradation_ , Part V – _Flickers on the Horizon_

* * *

There is singing, singing everywhere. The morning bright but not clear, white fog hanging from windows and from balconies like another sort of flag. It as if the sun were rising or had just risen, the pink of dawn dispersed about them, leaving cool paleness to mute the colors of the world—

And there are walls in the sky but he is standing atop them—

Below him a man that was a wolf is looking up strangely, blue eyes caught with loss and longing—

“Join us!” Valjean yells down, his heart bursting with joy and sound—

“Climb up what we have built and join us—“

* * *

“I will not run again.” Marius is saying quietly, gripped deep with fever. He has been repeating the phrase for days now, the words tumbling over and over in his delirium. Cosette finds it strange, that it would continue to plague him in lucidity.

“Surely your collarbone will heal, Marius,” she tries, hoping her voice can kill the thing that lives in the falling waters.

The man Cosette loves shakes his head slowly, tongue thick illness and with pain. “No, I will not run again; not on that shoulder, not anywhere, not from anything—“

“Sleep, Marius, please, monsieur Marius—“

Marius jolts at the words, eyes wild as he stares through her towards the rain. “Éponine—”

Cosette’s heart strangles itself at the pain in his voice, the hope, the anguish.

“No, Marius,” she reminds him quietly, thinking of a fox that snuck to her rooftop as a child; “Not Éponine. She is not here.”

“Where is she— there was a letter, a flower—“ Marius casts about desperately, his horse wild behind his eyes and in the tone of his voice.

“Should I sing for you?” Cosette asks and Marius seems to catch her at last, fevered eyes lighting on her face.

“I— yes,” Marius stammers, face haggard, skin sallow.

Cosette sings. Outside it is raining and a fox waits at the window, soaked to the bone.

* * *

“Tell me; what was it, Inspector, that you were to have said, that day in the factory—?“

* * *

Enjolras looks down at Javert as a hawk, like an eagle, like a phoenix; there is something in him that is made to burn, his red-dipped feathers shining strangely in the firelight. Behind him Grantaire is languid and sharp, a bottle of wine at his fingers and a cat in his eyes, loose and feral, pretending civility, attempting servility. Between them, animal and man, they spear the inspector with the weight of their combined gaze.

Javert looks back steadily and thinks of children and of prisons, and the honor that some men must make for themselves.

Javert passes Grantaire a chair for the barricade and Enjolras shifts oddly towards humanity, meeting the disguised inspector’s eyes with a smile as they build the wall around themselves.

“I admire—” Javert says (because it is the truth, because he must say something). He tries again, tripping on the words and a sense of guilt tangled strangely with rage; “I admire your dedication to the cause,” the inspector tells the boys, forcing the words from his mouth with something he hopes is nonchalance.

“We all have our duties,” Enjolras replies. The wolf inside Javert twists at the words, hard and cold, nose scenting the truth as it prepares itself for blood and for battle. Moreso than the man, Javert’s wolf has always known what it must do.

The young revolutionary’s hand is sun-fire warm where it brushes Javert’s on its way to the chair. It burns like a brand and his friend’s eyes speak volumes of recrimination for a duty that Javert has not yet but will not hesitate to later carry out. Within seconds, the chair is lodged against the barricade, shoring it up with hope and trust and faith, and though laid in causes disparate and profound, the depth of each is equally unshakeable.

* * *

The wedding is beautiful, everyone agrees. Cosette is blinding in her dress, her smile all the sunlight Marius needs in the strangely darkened Paris that haunts them both.

Marius wishes that he could give her forever; Cosette deserves everything from him, deserves so much more than he thinks he could ever give her. What does one give to the sun, save everything?

These are questions that Marius would have asked Enjolras, once, or maybe Grantaire, depending on the amount of honesty he was ready to receive. Instead, there is no friend at his shoulder to hold the ring, but Marius will live.

He must; there is no other option now that he is tied so to Cosette by word as well as deed. Marius may not have a spare forever to give to her, but he owes her all the time he has in him, for as ever long as that may be.

Grantaire would have teased him for his commitment and Enjolras would have complained at what he would have called the ‘unwarranted’ splendor of the proceedings, but Marius does not care. They need the commitment, the splendor.

Grantaire told them all once, about life and beautiful things; Marius will keep what he has of their words.

* * *

“I’m not even gone yet—“ Grantaire tells Enjolras, grip loose around the neck of the wine bottle. “Only half the bottle yet, I’m fine, I’m fine—“

Grantaire is a cat and Enjolras is carrying him home, the wine in his body too much for his cat to handle.

* * *

“Do not resist arrest—“ Javert is saying to Valjean, but his wolf is rising to meet them both and his (Javert’s, the wolf’s, the wolf that is Javert’s) eyes are daring him (pleading with him) _run, while you can, run (I dare you)—_

Valjean is a tiger and his paws are scrabbling on the paving as the wolf comes snapping at his heels—

A wall is up ahead and past its roof is safety and Valjean knows that he could have leaped it years ago but time is passing and Valjean is no longer the criminal that he once was—

“Fly, Cosette, fly—“

Valjean jumps—

* * *

Marius is standing at the barricade. There is a powderkeg next to him, a lamp in his hands.

Cosette is miles away, leagues away to be leaving soon; he will never hear larksong again. The horse that is Marius wants to be far from here, wants to be away from the flame and the gunshot and the death. The horse wants to run, to hide, to flee. To find Cosette and never let her go.

The man that is Marius wants to die, and he wants to die proud, unafraid.

He has spent long enough pretending at bravery and running from its consequences.

Let him do this good thing, for once in his life let him be brave—

* * *

“We make trinkets here, bracelets and necklaces mostly, all of them primarily of religious value,” the mayor is saying and Javert is trying to listen but his wolf is growling _tiger tiger tiger he is here chase him, hunt him prey ours **mine—**_

“It is worthy, to make something so noble of purpose,” Javert manages, shaking his head to dispel the cry of the wolf and the low songs of the galley. “These women can certainly use the gainful employment.”

“I find that is so as well,” Madeleine remarks, looking sideways at Javert, or else down at the rosaries in his strangely callused palm; “It is amazing what one may accomplish with a second chance,” the mayor says, right leg scraping slightly along the ground as he turns to face the chief of police.

“Are you quite alright, monsieur?” Madeleine ( _‘Madeleine!’_ Javert tells himself while the wolf goes on counting up clues) asks, voice laced with wary concern.

“Ah— yes. Yes monsieur le mayor, I am fine.” Javert coughs, turning away from the man and the things he might be. “Perfectly fine. Simply. Distracted. That is all.”

The mayor looks at the chief of police oddly, something nearly like wary sympathy crossing his face.

“Here,” he says (Madeleine, Valjean, the mayor, the convict) “I think you need this as much as I do.”

Before Javert can blink, there is a rosary in his palm.

The mayor’s hand lingers too long in depositing it. The calluses extend even to his fingers; his hands are warm and rougher than Javert had thought they would be.

The wolf inside him wants blood, but the man that is Javert wants something he can barely name and hardly knows how to ask for.

“Monsieur—“ he starts, but a scream from below, a wailing woman screeching for her employer halts them both as a man cries out in what must be tremendous pain.

In an instant, the mayor is at the door, is on the stairs, the limp of his right leg forgotten. His great charity is at work now, the concern of a superior for his underlings.

The mayor passes and the wolf smells it; like spice, like some intangible whiff of autumn, like fear and hope and hatred and, strangely, somehow, not at all of guilt.

Outside, Valjean is lifting a cart from a man singlehanded, one heavy enough that not five others could have done the same.

The wolf is crowing inside of him, but Javert feels as though he has shattered.

* * *

“When I was young,” Cosette starts, looking out the window. She trails off and does not complete the sentence.

At her back, her Papa is an old white tiger, lounging on the floor of their house by the fire. It seems that Cosette’s Papa can never quite shake the beast’s love of warmth, a fact he has joked on in the past.

It tilts his head to ask Cosette a question and she continues; “When I was young, living on the roof of the inn, a vixen would come and visit me. I suspect, now, that she was the innkeeper’s daughter, but I doubt I will ever be sure.”

Behind her, the tiger that is her father purrs in contentment, an odd noise out of such a large animal, the sound coming only on the exhale.

 _‘I wonder what became of her?’_ Cosette thinks, delicate bones sliding from woman to bird as she takes wing, headed for the gardens outside.

 _‘Perhaps she is happy,_ ’ Cosette muses; _‘Yes, I should hope that she is happy.’_

* * *

A tiger is looking up from the galley, orange head still held aloft on a neck unbroken beneath its yoke. Javert catches its eye; the tiger does not turn away as so many of the other laborers and their animals would in the face of the predator that Javert represents.

Intrigued, Javert continues to hold the beast’s gaze, listening absently to the songs of the galley the way that other men would listen to the sounds of the sea.

The tiger does not look down.

* * *

“Move, or we will all go up in flames,” Marius is saying and Grantaire is looking at him as if he were mad but Enjolras is looking at him with something like acceptance, or admiration. As if he were an Ami, a comrade—

There has always been something in Enjolras that was ready to burn.

* * *

“Life is not worth living without beauty,” Grantaire says at the meeting, sketching idly on the table before him, fingers blacked with a charcoal stick from last night’s fire; “man needs beauty and things he can believe in to thrive, it is only natural he seek them everywhere.”

Les Amis are smirking at him, catcalling and jeering playfully as Éponine enters the room and they mistake one thing for another.

“What’s her name, Grantaire—”

“Thalia,” Grantaire announces, pompous and prevaricating.

“That’s the muse of comedy—!“

“And is life not a spectacle?” Grantaire asks; “Is life not a mockery?”

“Leave the jokes alone, Grantaire, this is a serious place,” someone shouts.

Grantaire raises a solitary eyebrow, all lazy lankiness and smug. “Oh, a serious place, is this?” Grantaire drawls, sweeping his gaze meaningfully about the café, where students lounge and argue and wine is passed freely.

“Ah, but we have not heard from our fearless leader in _minutes_ ,” Grantaire says, drawing the word into something that could almost pass for shocked; “Oh, but this will not do! What say you of the muses, Apollo?”

“I think that you need to leave the poetry to her muse, Phemius, and the wine to the bottle,” Enjolras retorts dryly.

Grantaire clutches a hand to his breast, feigning injury. “You wound me, Apollo! Besides, I had always thought another Greek of myself, eh Orestes?”

For a long moment, the room is too serious, too quiet. Marius and Éponine look on at them from the background, the fox on Marius’s lap watching them all with beady eyes. A silence (or something as close to silence as the Musain could ever get) has fallen and for once Enjolras is lost for words.

It is all he can do not to fly from this place and suddenly for all Grantaire’s jokes Enjolras does feel as marble. He is frozen, he cannot move, cannot speak—

“Leave him alone, Grantaire,” Éponine calls out lazily, standing from her place near Marius; “all this highbrow collegiate talk is ridiculous. I thought we were here for the wine and song, not the droning of would-be poets and excited schoolboys,” she admonishes him as she deftly snatches the wine bottle from Grantaire’s fingers, bringing it slowly to her mouth.

In the crowd, someone laughs and someone else whistles. Éponine hands the bottle back to Grantaire with a smirk before sauntering out, Marius not far behind. The meeting dissolves not long after and as it prepares to leave, Enjolras’s hawk spots the drawing on the table Grantaire is rubbing out; a hawk and a mangy cat holding court in the woods, like some Greek teaching fable. But neither Enjolras nor the hawk can read the words that Grantaire has written by their faces and the man is catlike out the door before any questions can be asked.

This is fine, most likely. Enjolras would not even begin to know what to say.

* * *

“Stop that singing or so help me—!” Éponine’s mother shouts at the ceiling, voice louder than the larksong that quickly snuffs itself out.

Éponine frowns; the song had been sweet, and pretty, and far kinder than the bawdy, drunken tunes of the inn’s regular patrons.

Her father must sense her displeasure and looks down before bouncing Éponine on his knee, jogging her as he does what exists of his accounting that he can do in public; “Don’t frown darling, mother has sent the ugly bird away.”

Éponine’s frown deepens and curls into a fox’s grin. Irritated, her fox’s claws knead at her father’s trousers as the girl inside broods. Bothered by the resulting discomfort, Éponine’s father shifts her unceremoniously off his leg and the fox that is his daughter goes crashing to the ground.

Somewhere above, a lark begins to sing, this time quieter than before.

“Oh that is _it_!” Éponine’s mother shouts, striding to the door; “You’re disturbing the customers you ugly little—“

The invectives of the innkeeper’s wife fall away into a jackdaw’s cackling as one bird takes wing to accost another.

Somewhere above, drifting down through the chimney, the fox can hear the trilling cries of a small bird in pain and the girl inside it whimpers at the sound.

* * *

Marius goes first to the Musain when he can stand to walk, horselike or not.

There is still blood on the floor, mixed in with the wine and the places the bodies used to lie. The windows are smashed in; the furniture is gone, first as fuel for the barricade, then the homeless bonfires of Paris. This place has not been touched by the efforts to clean the streets, to sweep up the refuse of their failed revolution and the shadows in the building are strangling him in their number, the phantom sounds of their songs and laughter chilling Marius to the core.

Marius wishes he had not come.

* * *

They say that on nights when the moon is dark (or bright, or full, or halfway) a wolf can be heard howling from the roof of the court building, its hunter’s dirge starting the night’s hunt of lawmen after thieves, of society after the poor, the unlucky castoffs of fate settling down to fight one another to the death to survive in a world too harsh for daylight.

* * *

“I wonder,” the bishop says, wearing a shawl woven from his own wool; “if God made us with two shapes so that we could know them both, the animal and the man.”

Valjean is silenced, confused, but the tiger in him is howling for blood and searching for escape. It has lived in cages so long that even the walls of a cathedral can shut him in and the cat whines in fury and an impatience that is almost fear as the bishop speaks a lilting essay of beatitudes.

The tiger does not care about redemption. The tiger only wishes to be free.

(It does not know yet that one may not be had without the other.)

“Stay the night,” the bishop offers.

Valjean is gone by morning’s light with the bishop’s good silver and the donation box, the bag strapped to the back of a threadbare tiger, orange coat dull with pain and captivity.

Valjean is back by evening, dragged in by officers bearing deep claw marks and heavy truncheons. On the flagstones behind them is a man bleeding painfully in the streets and for that alone Valjean knows that Javert will destroy him. The bishop gives him his candlesticks and a hat made from his own wool to hide the prisoner’s shorn hair.

“Make something of yourself,” the bishop does not quite say, but Valjean hears it anyway, his tiger’s ears turned up at the sound of the benediction.

* * *

_‘He shoots straight; one shot, only one and it would be over—_

“Get up,” Valjean is saying and in his ears Javert’s wolf is silent—

* * *

One day in the park, Cosette chances upon a fox.

Its shape is familiar to her, its fur reminds her of an old friend, one whose countenance was lost to time and laughter, washed away with the years and the chilblains. Somewhere inside her, her lark is singing out to call the fox near, but the girl Cosette recognizes it as wild and turns away before her bird can sing.

Across the way is a sharply dressed man; he looks at Cosette as if she were the sun.

* * *

Grantaire used to paint, Marius remembers. Portraits, landscapes. Strange interpretive pieces that showcased Enjolras with his hawk alight upon his arm, Marius charging down the streets of Paris on the back of his horse, Éponine hanging out a window with her fox at her feet. Every Ami, every member of the ABC was painted lovingly in those early days, before Grantaire took to wine and women as a way of coping, before his pain grew too great to be beautiful any longer.

At Grantaire’s hands, in Grantaire’s eyes, they were all beautiful once. The scars and the hurt that Éponine will never be free of were brushed away and made to glisten in Grantaire’s eyes. Enjolras was cold the way marble was cold, was warm the way that sunlight was warm, as opposed to the ice and the fire that lives within him now.

And he, Marius?

In Grantaire’s paintings Marius was strong and bright. He was forever riding, flying forwards towards, and never away. Grantaire had always had the decency to show Marius only from the front, laughing in exhilaration, bent low over the neck of his horse with his hands fisted in its mane as they made the streets of Paris their own.

Later, Grantaire would strike only from behind, cutting to the quick all the flaws he would see, making mockeries of the virtues he once had lauded.

Now, Grantaire is dead and his paintings are most likely burned, or sold, or stolen like so many of the remainders of Marius’s friends.

* * *

There is a sickness in being chained.

The noose around Javert's neck is tight enough that he can feel it all the way around, save for the small place at the back of his neck where it hangs from above, a reminder of what will happen if he so much as moves.

The Inspector's knees are starting to ache on the ground; he is not so young as he was anymore, and he was never meant to be on his knees.

Inside him, the wolf is pacing tightly, snarling at the indignity of being made to wear a lead it did not choose. It cannot so much as flex its shape without destroying them both like this and the wolf makes its displeasure known, a low growl the whole empty echo of the Inspector’s thoughts—

The law has always been his master but it was never cruel—

* * *

“If you are marble, then I am Pygmalion,” Grantaire muses as he runs his fingers through the hawk’s feathers; “I could not help falling in love with perfection and now I must live with the cold limitations of its form.”

“But perhaps that is not accurate,” Grantaire allows, rubbing at the base of the hawk’s wing with his thumb, smoothing the pinions with his other hand; “I did not make you at all, Galatea; you have always been what you were, waiting for circumstance to realize you. Your goddess of life is Patria, isn’t it? There was no fair Venus waiting for you. Just the bonfire revolution, coming to charge you with storm.”

Grantaire’s hands pause in the hawk’s tinted feathers.

“And I am no Pygmalion, either,” Grantaire whispers softly, the mournful, wistful quiet of his tone so low that one would strain to hear it; “I am merely a painter and a drunkard, though his cowardice I share. There is little of me for you to want, Apollo. After all, what does one give to the sun?”

* * *

“That prostitute _attacked_ me—!“ The man huffs.

Behind him is a beaten dog, white fur matted red and brown with blood and dirt and other things.

“Look, she left a mark—“ Javert does not see the claw marks on the man’s face. Instead, he watches as the bitch pulls herself unsteady from the ground, growling as the mayor approaches her, lips bared over missing teeth in a snarl that fools no one.

“Come here, come here, I will not hurt you,” the mayor is saying, but Javert knows it is too late for her no matter what is done from this point onwards. Inside that dog is a broken woman and Javert has seen enough of mankind’s crippled beasts to last the rest of his lifetime.

Javert is at his heart an inspector, a diviner of patterns. He can recognize the signs.

* * *

Éponine is tired. Fox—bright, child sharp, eyes older than her years and younger than her wisdom. Too thin in her woman’s frame, in her borrowed clothes. She is sick, she is tired.

She is dying of a broken heart, one piece for each of the two people that Éponine loves and there is nothing left to keep the blood moving in her veins.

There is a letter burning a hole in Éponine’s bound breast, lovers’ words in changeable ink running from the paper to stain the cloth around her heart. They are not for her, never for her and she is fine with that, she is fine (she is not).

No matter which way this turns, one of them will be alone and she thinks the separation will kill them all if nothing is done; Marius cannot live without Cosette, and she not without him. Meanwhile Éponine will lose them both to each other, and there is no fairness in this trade, she knows, but she learned unfairness from the best of teachers, from the worst of men.

To cheat is in her blood, to steal is her trade by name, the shape of her fox—

Éponine grabs the rifle that is pointed towards Marius.

* * *

A stoat looks up at Javert from its hiding place in the barricade, red eyes glinting in the firelight.

“Good evening, Inspector,” the child is saying and hands go quickly to Javert’s pistol, to his handcuffs—

A club meets his skull and stars glitter behind his eyelids as his vision darkens, as a rope is tied around his neck—

* * *

Valjean is a white tiger and he is leaping through the window, cat body pulling around him as he falls graceless into the water below, the man balking at the shock and the impact, the tiger balking primarily at the cold. A lark is waiting for him in Montfermeil and Valjean has a promise to keep to her mother—

Fantine died in the shape of her dog, her own white fur matted and patched from illness, her long, elegant neck bent with strain—

Behind him a black wolf howls in frustration as the moon rises overhead. Tonight the lady Luna is bright and gravid; her light through the clouds over Montreuil-sur-Mer is enough to blot out the stars, sinister and strange.

* * *

There is a cat in the alley and Cosette is saying “come away from the window, Marius, please, before you fall ill again—”

Marius wonders why Grantaire never painted of himself.

Most likely, it is for the same reason that the once-painter so often preferred the cat to the man.

Towards the end, hardly any of them saw themselves as human.

* * *

“A collar, for the law's running dog,” Grantaire snarls, a dirt-streaked child standing close at his back as Javert comes awake.

“Beg like the animal you are and we might let you go,” the youth spits and Javert growls at that, man and wolf both.

That same someone yanks the rope around his neck suddenly and Javert chokes, falling to his knees. _‘Hate,’_ he decides then; _‘is a burning thing.’_

There is no ice in this; no winter, no stars. Only fire, only ash.

“Enough, Grantaire,” Enjolras's voice cuts in sharply.

Javert looks up to meet the face of the young revolutionary and finds it cold and frightfully inhuman; like the turning of the tide, like the cycle of the day, sun and moon have shifted in the sky. Javert had not noticed the falling of the night, the loss of the stars to the fog.

“There is no need to torment him,” Enjolras continues; “We would not have let him go, anyway—”

* * *

On the chest and wrist of Cosette’s Papa, a series of numbers are burned into the skin.

Cosette has seen them before only in passing— her father wears long sleeves to prevent the marks from being seen. But when he is a tiger, the marks are clear beneath the thin white fur if one only knows where to look. And there are more than two, at that.

On his back, just below the left shoulder, another brand, this one of letters; _TF_. Around his right ankle, a thick, indented, circular scar that Cosette pins as the cause of her Papa’s periodic limp. Along his back, long, thin strikes from a weapon that Cosette hesitates to think of. And of course, the numbers on his chest and wrist; _24601._

As a child, Cosette wonders what they mean. As an adult, she nearly forgets them completely, the same as she does everything from her earlier life, the one that she would rather leave in shadow and pain.

Later, Cosette will hear her father’s story from his own mouth and know that he was hiding his past just the same as she. By his graveside, she will wonder if he had ever come to terms with her past the way that she was made to; by circumstance, by accident.

Part of Cosette will hope not and the rest of her will wonder if it ever mattered at all. Her Papa carried his past on the surface of his skin. How could he ever forget?

* * *

“Family,” Fantine says, voice thick with disease and phlegm before breaking off into coughing.

“Family is all we have left in the end, monsieur le maire. Bring my daughter to me, before I die. I would see her if I could—“

A wolf is howling at the doorway and the gates are breaking in—

* * *

“She was my sister,” Gavroche remarks, eyes thick and old past aging; “She was my sister after all, stealing that shot for him—“

Grantaire wishes he had the words to comfort the boy. All he has instead is the anxious purring of an alley cat and patched fur he presses up against the gamin’s leg.

Gavroche is a stoat and he is twisting around Grantaire, shivering from the cold and the tears he cannot cry as a boy or as an animal.

 _‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’_ Grantaire thinks from inside the cat, drunk on sorrow and on wine, purring desperately as cats do when they wish to soothe and have nothing else. The cat sucks the air from the room and pushes at the stoat-child; look at me look at me; _I am here and I wish you not to cry, look at me and bask in my felonious splendor—_

Enjolras was always the one with the skill for words; all Grantaire has are his wines and his cat and Enjolras’s shadows on the wall and everyone in the ABC has something of that last, the impressions of the man who would lead the revolution cast up in their hearts and their eyes. But Grantaire has Enjolras in his bed and Grantaire is the one who knows the shape of his face at night when no one can see him, Apollo away from the sun.

But these are not things he can share with a child; the last is not something Grantaire would share with _anyone—_

Curled up against him, the stoat that is Gavroche is trembling and Grantaire shares all of what he has left to give in the face of grief and it is not enough, never enough.

* * *

A roar rings out from the sewers and the wolf inside Javert is alerted at the sound;

 _There!_ It cries, howling for blood as it takes hold and two feet become four paws—

_There there there—_

_‘At last,’_ Javert tells himself; _‘At last at last at last—‘_

* * *

“He will be executed!” Enjolras declares; “He came here as a spy and he will die here as one—“

“I demand the rights to him—!” The former soldier shouts, strained voice shouts, hoarse and near screaming; “I have suffered more at his hands than any other, he is mine—!”

The leader of the revolution stares, hawk eyes hard in a human face.

There is a pause, a standoff and the horse inside Marius nickers nervously at the lightning of it, the power of two men and their beasts facing one another like neighbor kings across a field of war.

Between them, the officer that Marius had come to know about the city is staring with blue eyes human for the first time in memory.

“He is yours,” Enjolras allows at last and the prisoner is gifted like a broken sword, passed as one former officer to another.

Minutes later, a gunshot rings out from around a corner and Marius closes his eyes at the waste of it, though some small, spooked part of him wonders why. The barricade is already soaking in blood. What is a little more upon the flagstones below save something to stumble in?

* * *

When Gavroche was very young, his mother used to hold him. When he was not much older, she turned him out on the streets.

“You’ll be better served out there,” she told him, eyes unreadable as she stared down at the child she had just flung from her doorway. “I’d turn your sisters out, too, but they’re still useful—“ His mother shrugs, and wings rise up at her shoulders as a jackdaw goes pecking after the boy, sharp beak reaching for his eyes.

The stoat leaves the inn very quickly at that, twisting into a less vulnerable shape as he makes his first acquaintance with the secret paths of Paris.

 _‘A new home,’_ it thinks, making a promise to itself; _‘a new home, a good home, my home—‘_

* * *

“Come away from the rain,” Cosette is pleading with him, her voice sweet even through the haze of his fever—

“There is nothing there but ghosts now,” she is saying and Marius knows, doesn’t she understand that he knows?

* * *

The sun is setting behind the barricade and a wolf is growling from inside a chained and beaten man, his neck still proud, unbroken.

* * *

Enjolras loves his revolution, Grantaire knows. He has always been one for justice, his Apollo, his sunbird and the optimism inside him has always been a marvel to behold. Enjolras burns from within with an all-consuming flame.

 _Someday he will gift that flame to all of France,_ the cat posits.

 _‘There is not much,’_ Grantaire thinks back in reply, much too drunk inside his cat; _‘There is not much that Enjolras would not try to cure with a flame—‘_

The cat wonders what would happen if the hawk were to take a flame to him;

 _‘A ball of fire and an explosion of wine-soaked fur,’_ Grantaire retorts, acid and amused. The cat nods in its own way and thinks this perfectly likely.

Grantaire wonders if Enjolras would do it anyway.

Enjolras has always loved his revolution. Grantaire knows that there is not enough room in a man for an animal and more than one great love.

 _Second fiddle,_ the cat snickers mournfully.

 _‘They make those out of catguts,’_ Grantaire spits back in rejoinder.

 _Why do you think I am laughing?_ The cat asks, then rolls over to fall asleep inside the man.

Grantaire is human and groaning and not nearly drunk enough to have this conversation by himself.

* * *

The shot goes wide above Javert’s head, glancing off the doorway in a shower of splinters and metal.

Once, just once, Javert turns to face him, eyes wide and desperate.

Valjean has not seen him so confused since Montreuil-sur-Mer.

 _He should not have been let go,_ the tiger complains inside him, tail lashing with impatience and disgust.

_‘What, so he should have died instead? I cannot condemn him to death—‘_

_You will regret that—_

* * *

Gavroche spots him in the streets and notes him every time to mark his patterns and better know the safe paths by day or night. A regular man and a creature of habit, the inspector is something of a fixture of daylight Paris, his wolf its midnight sentinel. Knowing his movements is only common sense, after all. The closest that the stoat has ever been to being caught is when the wolf was prowling around his doorstep, inasmuch as all of Paris is Gavroche’s doorstep.

Still, for Gavroche, there is something steady about the presence of the inspector in his city. With him in the streets, the bourgeoisie feel safe enough in them to walk about freely, easy pickings for the stoat and his legion of strays. The inspector means danger, means anxiety, means a significant challenge to the world around the stoat and his elephant. But, also, the inspector means adventure, means better food and living, means a secureness in the city and the world of her people.

Driving the man mad by diving into drainages and crevices where his wolf cannot follow after a long merry chase is only the added bonus.

* * *

“Might I show you?” Marius asks, tentative, unsure; “Will you ride with me?”

Marius looks outwards from the horse, pawing the ground unsteady, unshod hooves clicking nonetheless on the pavement.

Cosette stares at him, for a moment, for just a moment—

(His heart is breaking)

Her laughter sounds like starlight, like larksong—

“Oh, monsieur, I do not know how to ride,” Cosette is protesting and the man that is Marius is asking before he can stop himself—

“Will you let me teach you?”

* * *

_You have to remember_ the lark is singing in her dreams—

* * *

“I could never forget a face such as yours,“ Valjean is saying with far too much truth.

 _‘I wish that I could,’_ Valjean tells himself as Javert’s face twists, unsure of a compliment or an insult—

 _No you don’t,_ the tiger rumbles within him—

Javert decides, it seems, on the compliment, though barely. His smile is tentative, uncertain. Some treacherous part of Valjean ( _Madeleine!_ The tiger insists) wonders how often it is that Javert is given cause to smile.

 _‘No. No I don’t,’_ the mayor agrees. Something inside Valjean is twisted and afraid, full of hate and anger, but he has never felt so alive as when he was running—

The tiger can smell the wolf on him, like night and like steel and like death. Even in the dark Valjean would know him.

Valjean wonders if Javert would know him the same.

 _Obviously not,_ the tiger replies. _He’s looking right at us and doesn’t see._

Valjean is flooded with relief—

 _But the wolf knows,_ the tiger adds, a predatory note of satisfaction in its voice.

* * *

A stoat makes its way through the barricade, its paws gripping the furniture lightly enough to leave gouges in the heavens, red eyes glittering in the shallow light of the morning. Inside, there is a child, angry and afraid to weep. Outside, there is an animal, desperate to make its own providence, its own way.

Outside, there are soldiers just as dead as the soldiers inside. The only difference is that these soldiers carried guns well stocked and with the guns will come powder and bullets and wood for the barricade.

A stoat scurries from the barricade—

* * *

“Don’t you understand?!” He shouts, hoarse voice whipping into the wind over the bridge to be swallowed by the roar of the Seine—

_“We were always meant to have been chasing each other—!”_

* * *

Enjolras is standing on the balcony, flag in hand—

Soldiers point their rifles at him, he is not afraid, he is not afraid—

“No—!” Someone is shouting and the hawk in him would know the mere shadow of him from anywhere—

“I am one of them! Not without me—“ Grantaire is calling, struggling through the ranks of rifles before scrambling as a cat into his arms—

“Not without me,” the man that is Grantaire is saying, pleading, commanding—

“Enjolras, not without me; do you permit it—?”

Enjolras takes his hand.

* * *

Javert stares upwards at the stars, night a cold friend around his shoulders, cloaking all of Paris (all the world) in her embrace, holding them fast in her power.

There is a rosary in his hands, old and worn from the repetitive prayers of the lost: _‘Lord, let me find him, that I may see him safe behind bars, I will never rest till then, I swear; let me catch him, let me find **peace—‘**_

Javert thumbs at the beads again, jet wood smooth in his hands as he contemplates the stars, the fates, the turning of the tides and the songs of the galley, if such things could be called singing.

There is something to be said about the city form this angle, some praise that can be given for the tranquil nights where only criminals and lovers still move, the honest and the dishonest separated now by the turning of time. People scurry through the streets and Javert’s wolf can see it all, blue eyes piercing the darkness and robbing it of color. It is left to his nose to find the shades of meaning, of evidence; death, pain, illness, lust, anxieties, choices and above all guilt like a living stain, like a curse upon Paris and the world at large.

There is only Javert and his charges at work now in the city, only those deserving of justice and a man lost to his wolf and his purpose.

* * *

“You’re a menace, gamin,” the drunkard says to the stoat, throwing an arm around the child inside—

* * *

Cosette is not afraid of her father, or of his tiger. Her caretakers, if such attentions could be called either attentions or care ( _Thénardiers_ a disgusted voice provides her, as if this is a slur and the world has found it suitable) would have hated him. Cats eat birds. They would have turned him out, robbed him blind for that reason alone if not for any of their habitual others. In their minds, her Papa would have swallowed them all whole; Gavroche, Éponine, every single child, feathered or not.

Perhaps that is why they finally giver her away. Better that this rich man leaves the money and the children and eats the child they do not want than turn angry and destroy them all.

So they leave, the last of Madeleine’s money spent and yet Cosette is not afraid of him.

If a nun were to enter this part of the convent they would see a young, sickly girl curled up against the furnace of an old white tiger, nestled against its sleeping bulk as she sleeps. The tiger is watching over her, they would know, its striped tail twitching lightly as its chest rumbles with hard-won contentment and in the face of crippling anxiety and the scars that litter its hide.

* * *

Enjolras is standing at the balcony.

* * *

Men do not change. Not for the better, often for the worse. The best they may do is change their skin, their shape, but never the insides, the parts that damn or save them. Javert knows this, as the wolf knows this. But if Javert is damned, then so be it. He can still use his gift, his sin; the mark that defiled him at birth as the bastard son of an unnamed galley slave and a gypsy bitch whimpering in a jail, Javert has always been more wolf than human. And if this fact should make him sniff out the sin in others then so be it, so be it—

He is Javert, he is the wolf, he is the law, he is looking forever to the starlight his mother once taught him to read and he has since forgotten to count.

* * *

“A woman,” Enjolras scoffs; “sex, in favor of the revolution. You distract yourself, Marius—“

“I love her—“ Marius is declaring; “if you had seen her you would feel the same—“

Éponine shares a look with Grantaire and he with her.

If anyone else had looked then perhaps they would have seen it, the wounded looks they share, the resigned taste of knowing.

“No man has ever been able to control his heart—“ The lawyer Marius is arguing—

Too true, too true.

* * *

“We go halves, or you do not leave here at all,” Thénardier threatens, knife open in his palms.

Marius is heavy on Valjean’s back and the sewer is full of shit and blood, filth mingling indiscriminately with the scum of the streets, the bodies of her martyrs.

Marius is dripping steadily onto Valjean’s back and the stench of the world is drowning everything—

“Give me his money or you both will be dead—“

Valjean roars and the sewer shakes with the sound and the fury of it—

* * *

Marius has _always_ known about the ghosts that live in the rain.

* * *

“I will be waiting for you outside,” Javert had informed him, voice harsh and thick with something neither of them could name. “Return when you have settled your affairs with your daughter.”

Now returning to the doorway, Valjean sees nothing, no one. The streets of Paris are emptied of gunfire and emptied likewise of men.

 _I smell him,_ the tiger says and Valjean changes, follows, (chases)—

* * *

Enjolras flies among the rooftops when he needs to think the most. The sunlight is warm on his feathers and he revels in the feeling of it. The sensation is nearly as good as the feeling of Grantaire’s wine-careful fingers in his hair, in his pinions, in his hands, in his body. Enjolras knows that the lover in question would tease him mercilessly for that fact; Apollo, living up to his name, a creature of the sun. Still, Enjolras has never begrudged Grantaire the name, not really. There is something that can be said for daylight, for the bright truth emboldened by the sun.

Night may be the time for secrets shared, but sunlight reveals all in time and all are equal beneath its gaze. Some just happen to be able to fly higher than others.

Besides, there is a certain tranquility to Paris from this angle at daylight. People go about their ordered lives, chaos and poverty the only mars on the otherwise shining city outside the dark stripe of the Seine and Enjolras thinks, viciously, _‘good, it is good that they be forced to live with our disorder—’_

* * *

There is a strange white stoat that lives in an elephant with a host of other vermin. Its eyes are red and beady where it stares outwards from the gloom and its fur is unmistakably pale no matter how much filth may coat it. Some think the stoat and its horde are cursed, some supernatural cast of spirits set to be poltergeists for Paris. Others think them the ghosts of dead and orphaned children, come back from beyond to search for the graves they were never granted.

More still contend that they are not and never were even human. Gavroche prefers it this way. He would rather be an animal than a man, rather be a quick-footed stoat than a slow, starving child.

“Gamins,” the people call them, word spat disparagingly from their mouths; “Vermin, filth.”

It matters nothing to the stoat. It will steal their trinkets anyway and use them to pretty its home, or perhaps to sell for food.

* * *

Javert cannot see him clearly in the darkness; a hound can only see in black and white though both the tiger and the man lost their colors long ago. Worse, the stench of refuse and death float high above everything, drowning the world in its own wreckage and the wolf can smell nothing but the sick fragrances of dying.

In the dank of the sewer Javert and the wolf are blind, yes, but, oh, the sound, the sound of him. A heart too large to live in a mortal frame. One step dragging behind the other, hindered by chains that exist only in his presence—

The wolf’s ears twitch and Javert is frightened—

(The man, at least, can sense the end)—

“Inspector Javert?” The voice (the mayor, the convict, Madeleine, Valjean) calls—

* * *

“So what of Patria, then?” Grantaire calls out; “You would deny your grand mistress now, Apollo—?”

* * *

That girl is not his family. No matter what their blood may say, Gavroche gave his second name up along with his humanity when he was cast from the inn.

Éponine looks at him and she claims nothing of Gavroche. She nods at him, once; “brother,” and that is it, she is moving on, barely looking back when he does not reply.

Gavroche curls up inside the stoat, content to watch the world through beadier eyes. Yes, there are commonalities between them, but—

A fox is closer to dogs than rodents, after all.

* * *

“Anyone with families, anyone at all who wishes to leave, who does not wish to stay behind—“ Enjolras is pleading with the people, though for what Grantaire is not sure.

No one leaves, however and Grantaire wonders why Enjolras looks so surprised at this.

There is little left for them here save each other.

* * *

When Cosette was a girl, a fox used to play on the rooftop with her. The small nest that the Thénardiers had afforded her by the chimney was cold at night, but it was enough for a girl who was mostly a bird. Cosette does not always remember the innkeeper’s world, but her lark remembers everything and the shape of the fox kit that would bring her fabric and things to eat when they could be spared.

The lark remembers the fox that could have but did not eat it; maybe this is why of her Papa’s tiger, she is unafraid.

Cosette has recognized mercy from a predator before. The second time she sees it, well; why would she not approach the man when her lark says _he means no harm_?

 _He is safe, he is safety,_ the lark is singing and Cosette goes with him because surely he will save her—

* * *

The scent trail stops at the edge of the bridge’s barrier, where the night leaks into the Seine.

* * *

“Show me your paintings,” Enjolras says into the flesh of his lover’s shoulder, reveling in the taste of skin on skin. Grantaire smells like oils and like wine, like something transient and souring.

Grantaire’s skin tastes of sweat and of salt and Enjolras licks the rounded ball of the painter’s shoulder clean, pressing kisses to anything he can reach. His arms are wrapped around Grantaire’s body, beginning to fall asleep beneath the combined weight of both of them.

They are naked, they are alive, they are so very close to spent.

“Tomorrow, Apollo, tomorrow,” Grantaire promises, voice bright and laughing as he leaves his kisses in the blond waves of Enjolras’s hair, matted from sex and from sleep.

 _Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow,_ the hawk sings, but hawks were not made for singing—

* * *

Javert wonders how it is that Valjean could have changed so much between Montreuil-sur-Mer and Arras and back again. The man is forever changing shape on him; from the convict to the mayor and back again, and now a man by the bedside of a whore, his hair a blinding snow where before it had been distinguished silver.

The changes disquiet Javert, though his wolf is unfazed. The smell of him, the sound, the shape. Nothing has changed there save for the colors it cannot see, and so the wolf does not mind. What use does the wolf have for such subtleties as shade? The truth outs in the end and there is nothing so subjective as what can be mistaken by the lying eyes of man.

* * *

“Scream and I’ll make you scream” Éponine’s father is threatening her, hand tight around her arm—

Hand tight around her foreleg, her sharp teeth deep in the meat of his hand—

Thénardier curses with pain and drops her and Éponine scrambles away, paws clicking on the paving as she leaps the iron fence, climbs the garden wall, finds a safe roof to shout from—

* * *

The tiger leaps against Valjean’s hold as he points the gun away—

Valjean turns his strength inward; he feels like Hercules, but he is no hero and there is no lion to here slay. This is a wolf and the life and death of a decent man; if Valjean killed him now he would wear his pelt assuredly, but as a bleeding mark of shame and not a badge of pride—

His hand wavers, paws fumbling at the grip—

The trigger is pulled—

* * *

_‘We die in the shapes we were always meant to hold,’_ Javert thinks and his straight, proud, human neck strikes the wall in the Seine with a sickening _crunch—_

They are always leaping from high places into water to escape from one another, it seems—

* * *

“Nothing— nothing— it would have been a question—“

* * *

The first time he tries to change since the barricade Marius is blinded by pain and agony, fire lancing from his skull to the rest of his frame as his head injuries make themselves better known and his collarbone suddenly becomes a shoulder.

Marius is unconscious for the next two days. When he wakes, Cosette is asleep beside him and her mysterious, unnamed murderer (savior) of a father informs Marius that she has not left his side since he fell.

“She loves you more than reason,” Cosette’s father says and Marius wants to ask ‘why?’ but the words are stuck in his throat, lodged next to the bile. A neat pile they make, a ball of shame and acid, burning holes in him both.

There is nothing admirable about a man who cannot do his duty, or a horse that cannot run. It is only Marius’s luck that he should happen to be both.

* * *

“What do you believe in, then?” Enjolras asks him, burning.

“Honestly?” Grantaire asks, the cat playing in his eyes as he pauses the bottle at his lips—

“If you are so capable of belief,” Enjolras interjects snidely—

“Nothing,” Grantaire continues; “Nothing but you—“

* * *

_‘I hate I hate I hate,’_ Valjean thinks from inside the tiger, a lark pressed up against the white breast he is still not used to, his back pressed up against the wall—

 _No you don’t,_ the tiger reminds him, watching for the black wolf that runs below as they crouch along the rooftop—

_No you don’t no you don’t—_

* * *

“Teach me to ride, Monsieur Marius,” Éponine demands, lounging on a ceiling beam, legs swinging in the air, laughter in her eyes. She makes his name into a title, into a mockery, into endearment. There is no respect in her, not one single ounce for not one single man or god and Marius does not know how he feels about that, save for stunned and mightily intrigued.

“Well, you’d have to come down from there, first,” Marius is just saying and already a scarred fox has landed in his arms, a girl laughing in its eyes.

* * *

It is only later, crouching on an alien rooftop from inside a bird as a wolf howls below that the young Cosette realizes that her fox cannot come with her.

* * *

“There was nowhere we were to have gone that the other could not follow—!” Valjean is screaming into the night—

* * *

A white stoat has left the safety of the barricade.

A shot rings out as the beast rifles through the dead soldiers’ powder and a child falls to the ground, eyes wide and angry. They shoot him several more times before he dies truly— he keeps switching, painfully, with every shot (there is a wild stubbornness to him, this gamin-child)—

Stoat, boy, stoat:

Boy.

Behind the barricade, a cat is screaming with a man’s voice and the soldiers outside wonder if this is what the gates of hell will sound like, the wailing of the ones that know that they are damned.

* * *

“I was the one who screamed, Papa,” Cosette lies sweetly to her father. In her chest, her heart is beating bird-quick, too quick. Cosette feels as though she may burst from it, the excitement of it all.

On the rooftop above, a fox is batting at a magpie, hissing and spitting in the night.

 _‘I remember them both,’_ Cosette thinks and her childhood comes rushing back under the onslaught of time; _‘The fox and the magpie and the roof—‘_

* * *

“Dare you talk to me of crime, the price you had to pay” Javert growls lowly, sword in hand, the wolf in his eyes as he dismisses Valjean.

“Every man is born in sin” Javert asserts. Valjean goes whirling around the blade the police chief so openly brandishes—

To each their own chains of office, it seems.

Valjean reaches for the piece of chair.

* * *

“I am losing you,” Enjolras whispers into his shoulder so late at night (for once, they are both drunk); “I think that I am to have always been losing you—“

* * *

“Gavroche, I need a favor from you,” Marius says to him, leaning down, eyes red-rimmed from the tears he was not afraid to shed.

Gavroche takes the letter in his mouth. He will be there and back again like lightning and his sister is dead here at the barricade—

The stoat runs from the barricade, leaping under gunfire towards the crevices and cracks in the heart of Paris that only it and the rats know, young love clutched in its mouth like a talisman or a sword.

* * *

The wolf races after the convict before him, white hair a beacon in the night, the stars setting his shape to ice, burning with cold radiance on the inside of Javert’s eyes.

 _To think he could run—_  the wolf snarls, and does not finish the thought. Before them the man changes, becoming a tiger as he shouts for the lark to take flight—

The tiger in white is a marvel in the darkness. Black bands on white fur, stark in comparison to its previous orange, casting itself as the inverse of a shadow along the paving stones of Paris. The man inside the wolf pauses, struck by the sight and the wolf, too, is arrested by the vision, though not for long. The picture the tiger paints here in the alley is beautiful, yes, but this is a savage beauty. It is beautiful the way that all vicious, noble, hunting creatures are; proud, glorious and far more likely to tear you apart than to do otherwise.

 _Like to see him try—_  the wolf dares, smug, dismissive, daring. Again, it falls to Javert complete the thought, but he has not the words to even frame a question, let alone the response.

* * *

Thénardier is deplorable. A matched pair, the innkeeper and his wife. The magpie and the jackdaw, though Valjean can barely tell which from which when they are not human. He wonders which one is the magpie, which one is the jackdaw. Rarely does one see one of them from the other and never in his sight have they changed from man to bird.

Valjean suspects that the magpie belongs to the husband; he seems to be the sort that would take pride in his appearance and put stock in his trinkets. The wife seems more practical, more likely to see more than what shines brightest now, more likely to remember the child’s name in order to snake another franc from the rich man before her. The child in her hands is weak and thin with pain and with longing while behind her another girl plays in fine clothes with a soft doll.

 _Eat them,_ his tiger suggests, and Valjean balks at the fury of the beast, the anger that rises inside him at the sight of a young girl scarred with chilblains and hunger.

More still, Valjean is stunned to find that the anger is not only his tiger’s.

Perhaps he should not be.

Valjean has been angry for a long time. It is merely rare that he has outlets to use it, rarer still for him to take the option.

“I am taking the girl,” Valjean eventually announces, letting his voice rumble with the tiger’s fury.

The innkeepers stiffen, bodies tightening as they sense a predator that could destroy them. Fantine’s child is thrust towards Valjean and money is exchanged once more. Valjean leaves the inn with not a backward glance; it was dishonest to let the innkeepers be threatened by the shadow of his tiger, but Valjean has never been an honest man, now has he?

* * *

Enjolras is standing on the barricade, Apollo on Olympus. From the corner of his eye, Grantaire thinks that perhaps he sees a coffin, but he blinks and it is gone and he chalks it up to the drink, or the way that Enjolras smiles at him from his station, sunlight turning his hair to gold.

* * *

“Run, Cosette, Monsieur Marius; you have to _run—_!”

* * *

A shot rings out and inside the barricade, a man is a cat is a man is a cat is a screaming, wailing wretch that has lost what it thought it could not lose.

A cat streaks into the wineshop—

Enjolras cannot follow; there are invaders at the walls and theirs is the last barricade—

If he will fall as the others had fell, then he will fall in flames— ****

* * *

Javert steps aside slowly and lifts the near-lifeless Marius from Valjean’s shoulder as the old man watches, shocked—

Valjean is a tiger and Marius has no time left for wasting.

Javert drapes the boy across the tiger’s back, hands pausing momentarily in the stained white fur, fingers tightening almost reflexively against Valjean’s skin where they brush the nature of his brands, the final proof if nothing else would serve. The convict shivers at the touch and the tiger mirrors it as well, hide flinching and roiling as if to dispel a pest or a fly—

Javert’s hands jolt back as if the brand was given to him. Then they are moving again, finally, towards the exit and the end.

Valjean tells himself that he was not sorry to feel them go.

* * *

Grantaire wakes in the wine shop; what passes for the morning streaming in through the window.

All around him are pools of red, some of it blood, most of it alcohol— he is soaked to the bone and impossibly alive.

 _We should have died,_ his cat is saying, all low and mournful inside him; _we should have died for the stoat—_

“What do you think we’d been trying to do last night, then?” Grantaire mumbles at it.

Above, they hear the order to the firing line to form.

* * *

“My name is Cosette,” the vision is saying and Marius is spellbound; Éponine can feel them slipping away with every word, though which _them_ is left solely to God to debate—

* * *

“We caught him, chained him like the dog he is,” the revolutionary is saying, but Valjean can barely hear him over the roar of the tiger in his ears.

It is all Valjean can do to keep his hands at his side, clenched into fists that threaten to become claws. There is a part of Valjean that would tear the bright head from the shoulders of this young firebrand for what he has done, for daring to bind something that would only wear the chains of its own choosing.

Valjean is not in the least surprised to find that this part is nowhere near only tiger. For once, they agree almost completely.

* * *

The dead are lined up in the alleyway where the last barricade had fallen. A broken hawk, cradled in the arms of a blood-stained man. A girl in men’s clothing with her hand on the curled fingers of a dead child, her fingers suggestive of paws, her face suggestive of a thief. Countless others; animal and man and animal all tangled up one to the other, lying in a row and ready for the grave. Their bodies are all streaked through with gunshot; powder, bone, blood and ash staining their faces and their frames.

The child’s eyes stare up at Javert without seeing; Javert leans and closes them gently with his fingers, glad that his hands do not tremble. The symbols of his office lie heavy on his breast, weighing on Javert’s heart and dragging him downward.

One pin Javert removes and gives to the child, fixing it to his chest. The boy deserves it more. Shot for robbing bodies, the child was a thief to the end, but he was truthful. He was brave. There is more that can be said for this child than for half the men in France. Surely the law can give clemency for the children, even the ones of crime?

Somewhere inside him, Javert’s wolf is whimpering softly; this is never how it was meant to go. The lines were never to have blurred this way.

So many things have been done to him without his consent. The rescue, the reversals. His ethics are in disarray and Javert feels as though he has little to cling to; already, he can feel the trappings of his office doing little to assuage the guilt that piles on, the insistent shame of _miscarried justice_ beating down upon him.

But this was justice, was it not? They rebelled, they died. Treason, of course, has always been punishable by death. To derelict is to die.

A voice that sounds too much like Valjean’s and too much like Enjolras’s whispers quietly; _ah, but our duties are different, Inspector,_ and Javert feels sick to his stomach, his world filled with salt and with the dirge of the galley.

* * *

The world is filled with larksong, suddenly and Éponine is blinking from behind the garden walls, remembering a little bird often caged and beaten for such singing—

* * *

Enjolras and Grantaire are standing at the balcony.

* * *

A drowned wolf is found stuck beneath the pylon of Austerlitz bridge days later, black fur waterlogged and dense, a jet rosary wrapped around its paw. Its eyes, when they are opened by the mortician, are the kind of blue that stares from beyond the veil. Its neck has been snapped in half.

Not so long after that (for what are eight months in the face of thirty-six years), a man is buried in a churchyard, ancient and powerful, the lines of his face the only suggestion of his former strength. A pair of candlesticks go to his children; a jet rosary is left where it was found, tangled in his hand.

* * *

“You know nothing of Javert!” The chief of police roars, rage etched in every line of his body, every slash of his sword.

“I was born inside a jail, I was born with scum like you! I am from the gutter too!” Javert hisses, the admission wrenched out of him by the strength of some almighty hand—

* * *

“It would appear,” Valjean remarks, smile pained and streaked with blood and shit, a dying boy thrown over his shoulder; “that I am to be forever asking you for more time—”

* * *

“What will become of us?” Marius wonders aloud, tone strange and wistful on the day they bury Jean Valjean.

They are leaving the funeral and Cosette is a lark, nesting in her husband’s hair as he strides away from the funeral, steps still unsteady from the wound he will never truly be free of. There is no answer to Marius’s question that Cosette can think of, at least, there is not an answer she can think of that is not so inane as the question itself.

They will go on living. They will have to. Her father is with God now, like her mother before him and Éponine sometime after and all the rest of her husband’s friends eight months ago. They are alone now, the two of them. Besides the ghosts, they are all that they have.

Of course they will go on living. There is simply no other way to repay the lengths to which Cosette’s father had gone to save them both, no matter what his name may have been.

Jean Valjean stole some bread and assaulted a bishop. He broke parole and stole a child, but all Cosette can think of are his candlesticks and the way he held her hands all covered in chilblains. It’s been years since the memories resurfaced and Cosette knows she cannot let herself forget them again. Pain is what makes the sweetness of life worth tasting, she thinks.

The sun is setting over Paris and Marius is preparing the carriage that once upon a time he would have never needed. Cosette declines to ride inside with him, choosing instead to fly free and sing in what is left of the sunlight. Her husband is walking again. Someday he will run as a horse and the injury will mean nothing, but for now someone must sing and Cosette will make what she can of the light while it lasts.

The sun will rise again, Cosette knows. It, like them, can do nothing else. The globe would keep on spinning, yes, but the bones in the earth would remember them and while it lasts, Cosette thinks that they still deserve the sunlight.

* * *

“One would think that by now we would have learned,” Valjean continues, shifting slightly to adjust the deadweight of Marius; “that time waits for no man. She has certainly never waited for us—”

* * *

Shortly after another dawn, a man is climbing the barricade, chairs and coffins piled up like stepping stones. He falters, he slips (he falls)—

A strong hand takes his, warm, callused palm digging tightly into his forearm as he is pulled to stand beside his savior—

**Author's Note:**

> The lovely lady_peony made a [ graphic](http://qserasera.tumblr.com/post/45620368118/le-carnaval-des-animaux-by-constancecomment/) for Enjolras, Grantaire and their animals. 
> 
> The link to the prompt is [ here](http://makinghugospin.livejournal.com/9761.html?thread=398881#t398881%0A).
> 
> The title comes from the Saint-Saëns' suite of the same name, which was published fifty years after the events of Les Mis. I admit it; the only real connection is that they are both French, and that they both deal in the characterization of animals. This story is not humorous. Though it is tangentially musical.
> 
> The scars on Valjean that Cosette remarks on are there for a reason. The TF brand on Valjean's shoulder was a real brand given to prisoners at the Toulon Basque, signifying that they worked hard labor. As for the numbers on his wrist and chest, fanon supports the idea of Valjean being marked in either place with his prisoner's number and as far as I can tell, the book does make an allusion to their being some sort of identifying mark, though I wasn't able to find a good source as I don't own a copy of the brick.
> 
> Tigers can in fact purr, more or less. But only when the exhale thanks to things best explained by and whose semantics are still debated over by science. The question that lingers for the scientific community is apparently whether or not the broken lawnmower sound big cats make actually qualifies as a purr. For my purposes, we're just going to say it does.
> 
> There's a point in the story not addressed in the movie musical where after saving Champmathieu, Valjean's hair turns white. It's supposed to be a mark of his redemption and his purity and I liked the concept, so I applied it to the tiger as well despite the fact that this is completely impossible. Besides, it allows for a color dichotomy between Javert and Valjean, one that Hugo referenced more than once by making Javert dark and Valjean bright in their descriptions.
> 
> Yes, felonious does not mean what Grantaire's cat thinks it means. To be fair, one is proportionally more drunk when the potency of the wine one has consumed is suddenly multiplied by a factor of cat.
> 
> I know the prompt wanted both the innkeeper and his wife to be jackdaws, but honestly, the master of the house reminds me much more of a magpie. He's got the same unwise penchant for collecting trinkets, and seems to place more stock in his appearance than his wife does in the movie.
> 
> Another place where I know I stepped outside the prompt was in the chase sequences. I puzzled over the transformations for a long time, before I eventually sort of waved my hand and realized that it made more sense for the characters to make the change instantaneously. Unfortunately, this means that any transformation sequence would happen in literally the blink of an eye. As such, I apologize to the OP; I have failed you on this count.
> 
> I wish I knew more about the brick. I would have loved to include the rest of les Amis, ~~and add another ten thousand words~~ but I know I wouldn't be able to do them justice with the sparknotes version of the book and what I could glean off wikipedia and the fandom.
> 
> I apologize for quoting gratuitously from Javert's songs. Once would most likely have been fine, but doing it as many times as I did is probably tacky.
> 
> I definitely should have made more references to Ovid in this story. Honestly, this is probably the best fandom to put them in, and I am highly ashamed of myself for not doing so.


End file.
